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Saturday, April 23, 2011

Well, only sort of. I have been mistaken before for the actual paid entertainment for a children's birthday party at which I was painting faces. It was only as a favor to my mom's coworker and I certainly wasn't paid. Another mom was under the impression that I had been hired and actually wanted to get my information about doing her son's birthday.

In any case, I usually volunteer to paint faces at a school carnival/concert that we have during Earth Day/Week. You get the usual hearts/stars/flowers requests and then you get this:Actually, she wanted the giraffe and I decided to put the legs on her fingers.

I have also realized that I'm not really sure, off the top of my head, what Hello Kitty looks like.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

I love meeting other people's kitties. These two are especially sweet, and Daisy (the tricolor) loves to suck on ears :3 It's especially funny when their owner wants to get their attention/back in the house or whatever, she shakes a little tupperware of chicken or turkey or fish and yells "Chicken!" Apparently, everything is chicken to them.

Monday, April 18, 2011

It's been decided. I've become the designated thank-you-card-maker for my club. They all liked the last one so much, they decided I should make another for our speaker at the next meeting.

Now, I've always liked making my own greeting cards. I feel like handmade cards are such a nice touch. This probably stems from Girl Scout days when we had an actual Stampin' Up! party/demonstration as one of our troop meetings. Rubber stamps were the thing back then and I remember making thank you cards for all my teachers at the end of the school year. They were suitably impressed with my young crafting skills.

My crafting supplies are seriously limited with me living at school, so I make do with a few essential items. Some of the other stuff, like cardstock and paints, come from the college's art club supplies, of which I am the president :P But really, my X-acto knife is my best friend and one of the few crafting supplies I keep at my house here.

I was at a bit of a loss for inspiration when trying to make this card. I was rummaging through a box of art club supplies and found these card blanks with embossed flower pattern on the front. You could hardly tell it was embossed though. Good enough to start with, at least it wasn't from scratch. I cut out the flowers and stems with my knife, but left some spaces like between the flower and the stem to preserve some of the card's structural integrity since all of the cut out spaces were smack dab in the middle of the card. I cut out some white cardstock/art paper to fit the inside front panel (I miss my paper cutter! One of the few crafting tools I failed to bring here with me). Brushed on a nice peachy color behind the flowers and a green behind the stems, watered down for a paler color. The nice part about this is you don't have to be exact about where the color goes and so you don't get those icky "edge" lines in your painting, just a nice wash of color. I also took a fine tipped paintbrush and white paint and painted in the flower details (petal creases? stamens?) Finally, I faked my way through a calligraphy-looking "thanks" with the same fine tipped brush and white acrylic paint.

And there you have it. Not too shabby for a quick, thrown together kind of card. The cutting does get tedious though especially with the rounded shape of the petals.

And of course, I've got crafter's eye. I noticed all of the imperfections and didn't really want to give the card to the speaker because it didn't quite live up to my expectations of how I wanted it to turn out. I smudged the paint between the "a" and the "n" and there were weird glue stick residuals in random places and the cardstock wasn't the perfect size and the green wasn't dark enough in the end and I really botched up the name on the envelope (the handwriting, not the name!) and the list goes on. But it's all good.

Monday, April 11, 2011

A few next-day shots of the April Fool's day yarn bomb. Unfortunately, some of it got taken down before I got around to photographing. This was more of a decorate-the-trees-with-scarves kind of thing rather than a full yarn bombing. We didn't quite have the man/woman-power to really do it right, but it was still fun. I just wish I could have seen some of the reactions of the students when they saw the trees with their cozies.

Note: Blogger was having a bit of a hissy fit (and still is about picture uploads) when I actually wanted to put this post up, so here it is several days later :[

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

For April Fool's my crochet club STITCH (Students Taking the Initiative to Crochet Hats!) yarn bombed the quad area the Thursday night before. Unfortunately, it got taken down pretty quickly, so there are only a couple of night shots via cell phone camera. When I get around to editing some of the next day pictures, I'll sort through and post the good ones.

Ellen sewing on the tree "skirt"

Even the railings got some yarn love

We even made a nifty sign for the big tree that said "Let's hook up!" I love crochet puns :]

My club has a little ice cream social coming up for the members where we'll be meeting up with our ASL mentor pairs for the first time. And fast forward, we needed some flyers to post up about our event. Fortunately, the internet is a wonderful thing. Now we have some really lovely cards to hand out to our members.

Also, on the crafting front, two things. One, we had a great little yarn-bombing prank for April Fool's day (pictures to come). Two, I seem to have lost my only yarn/tapestry needle and as such, I haven't been able to work on any of my yarn crafts. Perhaps it will show up somewhere, but I fear that it has been left behind during our yarn bombing.